In many communications systems, disturbances may be received in a plurality of different forms. More specifically, a communications system may receive stationary noise and/or non-stationary noise. Stationary noise may include Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and/or other types of stationary noise. Non-stationary noise may include impulse noise and/or other noise that may cause a burst disturbance to a received signal.
Immunity to both stationary and non-stationary disturbances may be improved by using a “Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) margin” (expressed in decibels (dB)), which may be configured to determine the available SNR overhead in case of a sudden increase in noise variance. Typical margin values, which may be in the range of a few dB, may become useless in the presence of these high-energy bursts. Classical techniques to protect coded systems against such interferences without the use of external codes employ channel interleaving to spread burst-errors, thereby improving the burst-error-correction capability. However, these techniques suffer from one or more technical drawbacks.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.